June 2012 Archives

RIPE NCC is the registry for Europe, the Middle East, Greenland, and Russia. According to their web site, they have just under two /8s left in their pool.

When RIPE's pool falls to one /8, the existing allocation rules will be thrown out, and new allocation rules will go into effect. You might think of these as austerity measures -- they place significant restrictions on IPv4 allocations in an effort to preserve the final /8 as long as possible. APNIC, the Asia-Pacific registry, implemented their final /8 policy over a year ago.
This means that IPv4 networking in two of the largest regions is going to get a lot harder.

If you care about internetworking with Europe, the Middle East, Asia, or Australia, you should deploy IPv6 now.

Today is World Pv6 Launch Day. Penn State has been busy readying our infrastructure and public-facing services for IPv6. Over the last several years, our central networking group has improved IPv6 support in our core network and with our upstream providers. Over the past several months, various units have begun adding IPv6 to their services.

Several months ago, the University's IT Leadership Council formed an IPv6 Working Group. We set a goal of IPv6-enabling our major public-facing services by this fall, so stay tuned for more announcements.

Back in 2009, Netflix launched an experimental IPv6 streaming service. When they moved operations to Amazon, they lost IPv6-streaming ability, to the chagrin of v6 enthusiasts everywhere.

Now it's back. Earlier this week, Netflix relaunched IPv6 support (and you don't even need a custom URL anymore). I ran into one glitch during testing (you have to stream something over IPv4 first, then you can stream v6-only), but I'm hoping this is a temporary issue.

Streaming Nat Geo's Amazing Planet over IPv6

This should make life much easier for network operators. Netflix generates a huge amount of network traffic. As many providers are running out of IPv4 addresses, they have to find increasinly painful ways of providing access to the v4 Internet, such as large-scale NATs (Comcast's approach) and IPv6-to-IPv4 translators (T-Mobile's approach). Running all of Netflix's traffic through these systems would be painful. Now, all that traffic can avoid these performance-killing NATs.